Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2000 23:03:48 -0500 From: "t. c. frank" <t-frank-3 at alumni.uchicago.edu> Subject: Jerry Mander, former adman
Doug Henwood wrote:
Something.
Tom Frank replies:
Jerry Mander was indeed an adman in the Sixties, one of the crew working with the legendary Howard Gossage of San Francisco. Gossage's ads, like those of many of the best agencies of that period, were heavily, if obliquely, politicized. They always hinged on criticism of consumer culture of one kind or another. The agency did a series of very famous environmentalist ads for the Sierra Club, for example. And Mander went on from advertising to write the famous anti-consumerist book "However Many Arguments for the Elimination of Television."
The fact is, advertising people tend to be extremely liberal as a professional group. They tend to feel great guilt about what they do for a living. They have written some of capitalism's best mea culpas. (The Hucksters, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Pearl Harbor, etc. Some publisher should do a reissue series of these, in fact.) In the Sixties they did great stuff pro bono for all sorts of not-for-profit causes. They seemed to sympathize with even the most hallucinatory critiques of consumer culture. Some of them, in some ways, even considered themselves part of the "movement." Obviously the opportunities for them to participate in that manner have long since dried up (the space for PSAs on TV, for example), and obviously ad people nowadays have many times more interest in "radicalism" as a lifestyle to be sold to suburban youth than any actual politics. But maybe there still ought to be some marginal way for them to participate as individuals in . . . whatever it is we're doing.
TCF